Start here: the Technology Alignment Review — a structured look at how well your IT actually supports your business. Book yours

San Diego based · Serving businesses across the United States

Technology that pulls in the same direction as your business.

Ault Cyber Partners brings 25+ years of experience assessing IT environments and aligning them with business strategy. We give organizations executive-grade leadership across security, cloud, network, and compliance — without executive-grade headcount — and we fill the gaps that open up when there's no full-time CTO, CIO, or CISO in the building.

Where we step in

  • No CTO, CIO, or CISO on staff — but decisions that need one
  • An MSP keeping the lights on, with no one setting the course
  • A legacy system — green screen, accounting, document management — that has to be replaced or modernized without breaking the business
  • A cyber insurance application or renewal you can't answer with confidence
  • Ransomware, recovery, and backup questions resting on assumptions
  • Security and compliance questions from leadership, clients, or insurers — with no clear owner for the answers
  • AI initiatives that need a business case, not a buzzword
25+Years assessing IT environments
CTO + CISODual executive perspective
NationwideSan Diego based, remote & on-site
1 callTo find out if we're a fit

The Ault Cyber difference

Most providers start with products. We start with your business.

Plenty of firms can sell you a firewall, a migration, or a monitoring stack. Far fewer will sit down first and ask where your business is headed, what's standing in the way, and what role technology should actually play in getting you there.

Every engagement opens with the Alignment Conversation — a structured working session that maps your business objectives to your technology reality before a single solution is proposed.

It's the same discipline we've applied in the boardroom as a sitting CTO and CISO: understand the destination, chart the gaps, then choose the technology. The result is clarity, lower risk, and a roadmap your leadership team can actually stand behind.

  1. Listen: the Alignment Conversation

    A working session on your goals, growth plans, risk tolerance, and current frustrations — in business language, not vendor-speak.

  2. Assess: validate before you act

    We benchmark your environment against best practice — security posture, infrastructure, cloud spend, compliance readiness — so decisions rest on evidence, not assumptions.

  3. Chart: a roadmap tied to outcomes

    Prioritized, budgeted, and sequenced. Every initiative traces back to a business objective, so you always know why a dollar is being spent.

  4. Execute: with you, not at you

    We lead delivery directly or steer your internal team and vendors — including your MSP — holding everyone accountable to the plan.

Fractional CTO / CISO

Executive technology leadership. A fraction of the cost. None of the gap.

A fractional engagement gives you a seasoned technology and security executive at the table — setting strategy, owning the roadmap, managing risk, and translating between your leadership team and everyone who touches your technology.

Your MSP keeps the systems running. But who makes sure those systems are taking the business where it needs to go? That's the seat we fill.

Even the best managed service providers are built to operate technology, not to set its direction. We work alongside MSPs every day — defining the strategy, holding service levels accountable, and making sure the technology agenda reflects the business agenda, not the vendor's.

  • Technology strategy & roadmaps aligned to revenue, growth, and exit plans
  • Security leadership — risk management, governance, board and audit reporting
  • MSP & vendor oversight — contracts, SLAs, accountability, and renegotiation
  • Budget & ROI discipline — every initiative costed and tied to an outcome
  • Major-project leadership — migrations, platform replacements, modernization
  • Team development — hiring, mentoring, and structuring internal IT
Explore a Fractional Engagement

Services & solutions

Full-spectrum IT services, delivered with an executive's judgment.

Assessment-led by design: most engagements begin with an objective look at where you stand — your security, your recoverability, your data, your spend — and grow into exactly the leadership and services the findings call for.

Baseline

IT Health Check

An objective, best-practice review of your full environment — infrastructure, security, recovery, and spend — delivered as a prioritized, plain-English action plan.

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Security

Cybersecurity Assessment

A structured evaluation of your security posture across people, process, and technology — showing exactly where you're exposed and which risks to retire first.

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Resilience

Ransomware Protection & Recovery Assessment

A focused review of how well you'd prevent, detect, contain, and recover from a ransomware event — backups, segmentation, identity, and response — with remediation priorities.

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Insurance

Cyber Insurance Application Preparation

Carriers now demand proof, not promises. We prepare you for the application and renewal process — validating controls, closing gaps that drive premiums, and answering questionnaires accurately the first time.

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Continuity

Disaster Recovery & Backup Assessment

Verification that your backups will actually restore and your recovery objectives will actually be met — tested against real scenarios, not vendor dashboards.

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Data

Data Custodianship Assessment & Remediation

Mapping where your sensitive data lives, who can access it, and how it's governed — then remediating ownership, permissions, retention, and protection gaps.

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Visibility

Security Assessments

A clear-eyed review of people, process, and technology controls that shows where you stand, where the gaps are, and which risks to retire first.

Exposure

Vulnerability Management

Programmatic scanning, prioritization, and remediation tracking — turning an endless vulnerability list into a managed, shrinking risk surface.

Validation

Penetration Testing

Real-world attack simulation, coordinated with trusted testing partners, for when you need proof beyond scanners and checklists.

Readiness

Incident Response Planning

Playbooks, roles, and decision frameworks built before you need them — so a bad day doesn't become a defining one.

Practice

Tabletop Exercises

Facilitated breach simulations that pressure-test your leadership team's response, surface gaps, and build muscle memory ahead of the real thing.

Hardening

Security Hardening

Tightening identity, endpoint, email, and network configurations against verifiable benchmarks when out-of-the-box settings aren't enough.

Detection

SIEM / SOAR Enablement

Centralized logging, meaningful detections, and automated response — so the signal reaches you before the attacker's objective does.

Boardroom

Executive & Board Security Briefings

Security posture translated into business risk for boards, partners, and leadership — delivered by someone who has sat on both sides of that table.

Culture

Security Awareness Programs

Training programs that actually change behavior — phishing resilience, policy adoption, and a workforce that acts as a control, not a liability.

Baseline

Infrastructure Assessment

A rapid, structured review of your network and infrastructure health — capacity, resilience, lifecycle, and risk — with a prioritized remediation plan.

Connectivity

SD-WAN Design & Deployment

Modern branch and multi-site connectivity engineered for performance, resilience, and central control — without the legacy circuit costs.

Wireless

Wireless Surveys & Refresh

Predictive and on-site surveys plus enterprise-grade wireless design for environments where coverage, capacity, and reliability genuinely matter.

Containment

Segmentation & Zero Trust

Network segmentation and zero-trust access that enforce least privilege and limit how far an intruder — or a mistake — can travel.

Performance

Virtualization & VDI Optimization

Deep tuning of VMware and virtual desktop environments — capacity planning, performance diagnostics, and architectures that hold up under load.

Modernization

Platform & Infrastructure Modernization

Retiring aging systems — from legacy applications to end-of-life platforms — with migration plans that protect continuity and data.

Migration

Cloud Migration

Moving critical workloads with tested cutover and rollback plans — protecting uptime, performance, and the people who depend on both.

Spend

Cloud Cost Optimization

Right-sizing, reserved capacity strategy, budgets, and alerts — recovering the spend that quietly accumulates in every cloud environment.

Resilience

Backup, DR & Resilience Design

Backup and disaster recovery architectures designed — and actually tested — to meet your recovery objectives when downtime isn't an option.

Strategy

Cloud Strategy & Architecture

Public, private, or hybrid — an honest, vendor-neutral assessment of what belongs where, and a reference architecture to keep it disciplined.

Workplace

Modern Workplace & Collaboration

Microsoft 365 and cloud communications done right — identity, email, telephony, and collaboration platforms unified, secured, and adopted.

Endpoints

Endpoint Modernization & MDM

Device management, zero-touch deployment, and zero-trust endpoint security across Mac and Windows fleets — from policy to rollout.

Posture

Security Policy & Compliance Assessment

Your policies, controls, and practices measured against the frameworks that matter to you — with a gap analysis and a pragmatic path to closure.

Vendors

Third-Party Risk Management

A TPRM program that evaluates and continuously monitors vendor risk — because your security posture now includes everyone you do business with.

Data

Data Classification & DLP

Knowing where sensitive data lives, who can touch it, and how it's prevented from leaving — classification and loss-prevention controls that hold.

Records

eDiscovery, Retention & Records

Defensible retention schedules and eDiscovery workflows for litigation, audit, and investigation — built with deep experience in legal-sector technology.

Privacy

Privacy Program Enablement

Privacy policies, impact assessments (DPIA/PIA), and operating practices that turn regulatory obligations into a repeatable program.

Audit

Audit Support

Full-lifecycle support for IT and cyber audits — government, client-initiated, or self-imposed. We conduct audits, respond to them, gather evidence, remediate findings, and build the governance policies and processes behind them — meaningful outcomes, not checked boxes.

Strategy

AI Readiness Assessment

An honest evaluation of your data, security, governance, and use cases before you invest — so AI starts with a business case, not a license count.

Productivity

Copilot & AI Assistant Enablement

Planning, securing, and rolling out Microsoft Copilot and similar assistants — permissions hardened, data protected, adoption measured.

Evaluation

AI Product Evaluation & ROI Analysis

Vendor-neutral assessment of AI tools and platforms against your real workflows — separating measurable return from marketing.

Governance

AI Governance & Acceptable Use

Policies, guardrails, and review processes that let your teams use AI productively without exposing data, clients, or reputation.

Custom

Custom AI Solutions

Scoping and overseeing purpose-built AI workflows — from document automation to internal knowledge tools — with the right partners for the build.

Security

AI Security Review

Assessing the new attack surface AI introduces — prompt injection, data leakage, shadow AI — before it becomes an incident.

Migration & modernization leadership

Replacing a legacy system shouldn't feel like betting the business.

Every organization eventually faces it: the green-screen platform that quietly runs everything, the accounting system its vendor stopped investing in, the document management system hitting end-of-life, the on-premise workload that belongs in the cloud. The replacement is overdue — and everyone is afraid to touch it, because the last thing the business can afford is the migration going wrong.

We lead system replacements end to end — from the first requirements workshop to the day the old system is finally switched off — and we've done it with more than two decades of production data on the line.

Core line-of-business software, accounting, document management, or anything in between; on-premise to cloud or whatever the need calls for. What these projects fail without is executive ownership — honest requirements, vendors held to their promises, and a schedule someone is actually accountable for. That's what we bring.

Explore Modernization Services

  1. Define the requirements

    Captured from the people who actually do the work — separating what the business genuinely needs from what vendor demos are selling.

  2. Architect the replacement

    The target configuration designed before anything is bought: integrations, data model, security, and how it fits the systems staying behind.

  3. Select and approve vendors

    Structured evaluation against your scenarios — not their slideware — with real pricing comparisons and contract terms negotiated from the buyer's side.

  4. Manage the implementation

    One executive owner across vendor, integrator, and internal teams — decisions made quickly, scope protected, surprises escalated instead of buried.

  5. Track milestones and deadlines

    A visible plan and status reporting leadership can trust, with slippage surfaced early enough to fix rather than discovered at the deadline.

  6. Land it successfully

    Data migrated and validated, users trained, cutover and rollback rehearsed — and the legacy system retired for good, not kept limping alongside.

Assessment first. Action second.

How healthy is your IT environment — really?

Most leaders are operating on assumptions: that backups will restore, that a ransomware event is survivable, that the cyber insurance questionnaire was answered correctly, that the MSP report tells the whole story. Our assessment practice — health checks, cybersecurity assessments, ransomware readiness, disaster recovery and backup validation, data custodianship reviews, and insurance application prep — replaces those assumptions with evidence and a prioritized, plain-English action plan.

Request a Health Check

A Health Check is especially valuable if…

  • Configurations haven't been independently validated in over a year
  • Your team — or your MSP — is stretched thin
  • Security and recovery practices rest on assumptions, not tests
  • Growth, turnover, or new systems have outpaced documentation
  • You want clarity before something breaks — or before a renewal, audit, or budget cycle

Who we work with

Built for organizations of every size — especially the ones an MSP alone can't fully serve.

Small business

Too small for a CTO. Too important to wing it.

You get the strategy, security oversight, and vendor accountability of an executive technology leader — sized and priced for a business your size, with no headcount added.

Mid-market

Growing fast, with technology straining to keep up.

We bring the roadmap, governance, and major-project leadership that turn scattered IT spending into a deliberate platform for growth — and make your MSP relationship truly work.

Larger organizations

Deep expertise for high-stakes initiatives.

Interim leadership, independent assessments, M&A technical due diligence and post-merger technology harmonization, and board-level security guidance — backed by Fortune 500 engineering experience and over a decade in the CTO chair.

Frequently asked questions

Straight answers, before the first call.

Who is Ault Cyber Partners?
Ault Cyber Partners is a strategic technology and security consultancy founded by Brian Ault, a technology executive with more than 25 years of experience — including 17 years engineering at Fortune 500 scale and over a decade as a sitting CTO, alongside hands-on CISO leadership. We help organizations align their technology, security, and vendors with where the business is actually going.
What does Ault Cyber Partners do?
We provide fractional CTO/CIO/CISO leadership and a full range of IT services across security, cloud, networking, privacy and compliance, AI, and operational support. Engagements are designed to validate the health of your environment, close the gaps, and provide ongoing executive guidance — not to sell you tools.
How are you different from an MSP or other IT providers?
We're not competing with your MSP — we complete it. Managed providers are built to operate technology; we're built to direct it. Our difference:
  • We begin with your business strategy, then work backward to technology
  • We validate with evidence before recommending action
  • We measure success in business outcomes and risk reduction, not tickets closed
  • We hold every vendor — including the MSP — accountable to your plan, because we don't resell anyone's products
We already have an MSP. Why would we need you?
Even excellent MSPs operate from a service catalog, not your strategic plan. They rarely sit in your leadership meetings, weigh in on your growth strategy, or push back on their own scope. We fill that gap: setting direction, translating business objectives into a technology roadmap, and making sure the MSP's work — and pricing — serves it. Most MSPs do their best work when someone on the client side is providing exactly this kind of direction.
What's your approach to IT and security?
Assessment first, action second. Leaders deserve real visibility into the health, risk, and readiness of their environment before committing budget. That's why most engagements begin with the Alignment Conversation and a Health Check — and why every recommendation we make traces back to a documented business objective.
What does a fractional engagement look like?
Typically a recurring monthly commitment — anywhere from a few hours of advisory time to one or two days a week of embedded leadership — shaped around your needs. You get a named executive who learns your business, attends your leadership meetings, owns your technology roadmap, and is reachable when it counts. Engagements scale up for major projects and down as your internal capability matures.

Let's connect

One conversation will tell you if this is the partnership you've been missing.

Book a no-obligation discovery call. Bring your frustrations, your roadmap — or the absence of one. We'll bring 25 years of pattern recognition and a straight answer about whether we can help.

Prefer to talk? Call (619) 839-9447 or email info@aultcyberpartners.com · Point Loma — San Diego, CA · Serving businesses across the United States